Adventures In Online Marketing

I got my hands on a pdf of the old, out-of-print book, "Building Online Communities" by Amy Jo Kim.

While the tech references are dated (from 2000), there aren't that many, and I'm really fascinated by her descriptions of the life-cycle of community members and fosting a sense of place, loyalty and belonging.

I ultimately am convinced that building my site is a multi-faceted process that will include both social and technical considerations.

The ...

My adsense revenue is slooooowly, sloooowly starting to creep up. I updated my plugins that allows for slightly better tracking: I can now see what page lots of the clicks are on. (FF still doesn't cooperate.) But it's still pretty low overall.

I tried to add a clicktracking script, but it worked poorly and seemed to lag the site as well, so I dropped that.

Ultimately, I want to continue to optimize my adsense, and then integrate alternative ads in there as well. I'm ...

I ran across an interesting new tool when I was perusing my list of linkbacks in analytics... Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings Service.

The traffic listing they had for me appeared too low, but I was very interested in the demographics they had, and it occurred to me that sort of info would be of significant interest to possible advertisers. I'd like to diversify from my "adsense is the only thing that makes my site any money, damnit" stategy, long term.

So ...

I've been trying to take the LONG term approach to SEO, with the idea that doing little things, every time I can think of them, is more effecitve than doing one or two big things and then forgetting about the process.

So when I do my content in my CMS, I've been working on making sure all the links have titles with (hopefully) SEO-relevant keyworks, and same goes for image alt tags. I don't know if I'm going to end up going too high on keyword percentages, but overall, I think it's ...

After installing the welcome headers mod the other day (and a great big, honkin' googlead next to my image header for guests), I'm ancedotally noticing some differences.

I did customize the messages for my userbase; my community is basically known for friendliness and supportivenss, so that's the tone I looked to hit and I think I was reasonably successful.

Linking to the intro forum in the "you haven't posted yet" message especially seem to encourage folks ...